July 2018
Art Night is London’s largest free contemporary arts festival, transforming a different part of the city annually for one unforgettable night on 7 July 2018 with a series of artist’s projects in extraordinary locations along the South Bank. Canadian born artist Tamara Henderson was New Covent Garden Market’s highlight for this year’s event.
Sponsored by VINCI St. Modwen and taking place on the only night that the Flower Market is closed, Henderson’s performance replaced the trading activity with a cast of eight characters.
Constructed from materials found at the Flower Market, each character was conceived as a sculpture for the actors to wear in a choreographed procession through the specially lit Flower Market. The characters derive from the life-cycle of the plants and flowers, their origins in seeds, earth and water, incorporating the daily activities of the Flower Market and its symbology and language. Henderson herself featured in the performance operating a camera to film the event as the ‘eye’ witnessing the night’s activity
Art Night Open consisted of satellite events happening around the main featured art installations. Özge Topçu’s work Agora was inspired by the idea of the marketplace. Topçu engaged with the local community through a series of workshops at the ROSE community centre, where she asked the participants to come up with designs for alternative public spaces which can be built from one of the key components of the market place – the market box. Built during Art Night, the new structure was used as a social meeting point for those walking the trail.
www.ozgetopcu.com | Instagram @ozgetopcuart
Anna Skladmann’s installation Ghost In The Machine sits at the front of the Flower Market.
Skladmann has taken flowers from the market and set that against errors from her scanning machine. Her work explores how nature and the machine can work both with and against each other.
This piece remains at the entrance to the Flower Market on Nine Elms lane, so you if you missed Art Night you can still see it for yourself.
www.annaskladmann.com | Instagram @askladmann
In her sound installation, Hammer & Anvil: Stems, on the upper car park of the Flower Market, Georgina Hill reconstructed the 1970s Flower Market. Listeners could hear field recordings and eyewitness accounts from the old market. The work conveys the changing nature of the area, with its many embedded architectural and personal histories, and reflects on the evolution of New Covent Garden Market.
Instagram @georginalhill